Once the original became available in paperback the task of promotion was replaced by a need to explicate the links between those sections of the novel set in 2340 AD and those between 1924 and about 1950. Readers of even the uncut edition were sometimes unsure of Barnard’s purpose and felt the construction to be ungainly.

The unity of the parts is another subject. For the moment, I’ll do no more than recommend that those who have not had the pleasure of TTT add it to your New Year resolutions, as well as to your list of presents for the summer solstice.

To help settle the relationship between TTT and science fiction I turned to Brian Aldiss’s Trillion Year Space which suffers from the flaw of much science fiction prose – over-excitement and thin characterisation – yet makes a host of valuable connections

By-passed by the keepers of the literary canon – many of which Aldiss claims for science fiction.

From Aldiss I went on to Olaf Stapleton’s Last and First Men wherein I discovered that, like M. Jourdain, I had been practising the religion of ‘Gawdelpus’ all my adult life without knowing what to call it.

George Turner’s memoirs, In the Heart or in the Head, provided additional information about SF in Australia but those chapters were as nothing compared with the accounts he gives of his parents and alcoholism to which his musical education makes a con brio counterpoint.

Returning to Plato, I realised that the Symposium is a splendid film script and the case for its author being an enemy of the open society rests of the way Socrates sets up his questions as closed systems. A question from Socrates is a trap to snare his audience into some position that Socrates already holds, not a means by which both sides can discover a truth.

Of course, I have had to read all of M. Barnard Eldershaw, rediscovering the wicked wit of their Plaque with Laurel (1937) as a satire on the vanities of Australian authors and the clear headed charms of Macquarie’s World where history is brought to life, and vice versa. For the first time, I have tasted the acerbity of their Essays in Australian Fiction whose first page reminds us that

A great many silly women have written a great many silly novels – and a great many silly men have, too.

Most of all I have gone back to the text of TTT, each time coming away with further evidence of its richness in storytelling and depth of ideas, a combination which encouraged Jill Roe to ask if TTT were the Australian War and Peace. Again under the guise of doing research, I took the opportunity to read War and Peace. As an undergraduate I pretended to have read books I knew only by repute or reviews; nowadays I revel in the fact that no matter how long I go on reading the supply of worthwhile books will always be larger than the time available to read them.

TTT stands in the same field as War and Peace, making it superior to Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty Four or We. Tolstoy has the ability to be boring in a fascinating way. On her smaller stage, Barnard has not time for mowing hay or making jam. Some things she brings off better than Tolstoy. Her burning of Sydney catches light in a complete and convincing way while Tolstoy’s Moscow burns with a perfunctory glow. Her Sydney is also a better blaze than Vonnegut’s Dresden. More importantly, she comes closer to integrating a disquisition on the nature of history into her plot and characters than Tolstoy. While the catalogue of books that I have allowed myself to read under the justification of doing research is ‘long, through every passion ranging’, I have not been idle at that other end of the spectrum where accumulate those specks that make up the chronology of a life: what month and year to give to a letter dated simply’ ‘Sunday 7’?

One minutia intrigues me: where did she get the title? Obviously from Macbeth, Act V, Scene v. But why and how did that line stay with her? She had used it about a tardy publisher in a 1934 letter. Then she announced in 1937 that her novel of the future would bear the title ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ before she had written a line. (That aspect I could appreciate since I had carried The Black Swan of Trespass’ as a title for three years before finding an appropriate subject.)

Hence I arranged for a researcher to check Barnard’s educational record and she has informed me that Macbeth was a set text in Barnard’s intermediate year at high school and again in her English units at university. Here then were opportunities for Barnard to memorise the These occasions do not explain why that line stuck until she used it as a title. For Macbeth, the speech is defiance in defeat which is how Barnard felt when she sat down to write in 1941 but not how .she saw the world when she had proposed the title in

1937. Had she been reminded by Faulkner’s novel? Her mentor, Aldous Huxley, later took the line as the title for a collection of his essays – had he used it in an earlier piece as well? Should I read Faulkner and all of Huxley as well?

There is something unbalanced in a professor of international relations in Tokyo sending yen to Australia to find out the details of a dead novelist’s high school education. What tips the scales towards sanity is the pleasure in finding even one part of the answer. After our soundest theories have self-deconstructed, it is possible that the only trace of scholarship will be a slightly improved chronology.

In a couple of years I could produce something more substantial on TTT, perhaps a book, and then once more experience the thrill of being published. Meanwhile, I need the encouragement that flows from research into recondite questions whose answers might never appear in print. Such are the infirmities of mind that help me spurn delight and live laborious days and justify finally reading War and Peace.